The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (61 page)

The pursuit lasted over a week; it was not until 21 April, at Graz, that the two exhausted deputies finally drew up before the French camp. Bonaparte received them courteously enough, and listened in silence to their protestations of friendship. Then, suddenly, his mood changed. Striding back and forth across the room, he launched into a searing diatribe against Venice, her government and her people, accusing them of perfidy, hypocrisy, incompetence, injustice, ‘medieval barbarities’ and–most serious of all in his eyes–hostility to himself and to France. He demanded the immediate release of all political prisoners–threatening, if this were not done, to break open the prisons himself. What, he continued, of all the Frenchmen whom the Venetians had murdered? His soldiers were determined to have their revenge, and he would not deny it to them. Any government unable to restrain its own subjects was an imbecile government and had no right to survive. He ended with those terrible words that were soon to echo in the heart of every Venetian:
‘Io sarò un Attila per lo stato veneto’
–‘I shall be an Attila to the state of Venice.’

When the two envoys returned to Venice with their report, Doge Lodovico Manin and his colleagues saw that the Republic was doomed. War was imminent; further negotiation was impossible; the
terra firma
was as good as lost. The only hope of saving the city itself from destruction lay in capitulation to the conqueror’s demands, and these demands were terrible indeed: nothing less than the abdication of the entire government and the abandonment of a constitution that had lasted more than a thousand years–the suicide, in fact, of the state.

On Friday, 12 May 1797, the Great Council of Venice met for the last time. Many of its members having already fled the city, it fell short–by sixty-three–of its constitutional quorum of 600, but the time for such niceties was past. The Doge was just completing his opening speech when the sound of firing was heard outside the palace. At once, all was in confusion. To those present, such sounds could mean one thing only: the popular uprising that they had so long dreaded had begun. Their only hope of survival was to escape from the palace while there was still time. Within minutes, the true source of the firing had been established: some of the Dalmatian troops, who were being removed from Venice on Bonaparte’s orders, had symbolically discharged their muskets into the air as a parting salute to the city. But the panic had begun; reassurances were useless. Leaving their all-too-distinctive robes of office behind them, the remaining legislators of the Venetian Republic slipped discreetly out of the palace by the side entrances. The Serenissima was no more.

Lodovico Manin himself made no attempt to flee. In the sudden stillness that followed the break-up of the meeting, he slowly gathered up his papers and withdrew to his private apartments. There he removed his
corno
–that curiously shaped cap which was the principal symbol of his office–and handed it to his valet. ‘Take this,’ he said, ‘I shall not be needing it again.’

From the inauguration of the first Doge in 726 to the resignation of the last in 1797, the Venetian Republic had lasted 1,071 years–only half a century less than the Empire of Byzantium. For much of that time Venice had been the acknowledged mistress of the Mediterranean–politically, constitutionally, commercially, artistically and architecturally a wonder of the world. How pleasant it would be to record a less ignominious end, with her people showing, as their Republic began to totter, some spark of that endurance and courage that they had shown often enough in defending their colonies against the Turks–or that their own grandchildren were to show against the Austrians half a century later. One would not have asked for–and certainly not have expected–a heroic resistance such as had been seen on the walls of Constantinople in 1453: merely a flash of the old Venetian spirit, which would have allowed the Serenissima to pass into history with some semblance of honour. But even that was lacking. The last tragedy of Venice was not her death; it was the manner in which she died.

Thus it was that when the Treaty of Campo Formio was signed on 17 October, Austria received even more than she had expected at Leoben: not just the Venetian
terra firma
, but the city itself. Napoleon Bonaparte, however, was well pleased. He had always believed–probably rightly–that he could master Italy so long as it remained divided. Already in December 1796 he had formed his Cispadane Republic
¹⁹³
out of the merger of the duchies of Reggio and Modena and the papal states of Bologna and Ferrara. The following June he had established his Ligurian Republic with its capital in Genoa, and in July his Cisalpine Republic based on Milan. As for Venice, he himself had never set foot there and had no desire to; he saw it–quite erroneously–in his mind’s eye as a brutally repressive police state, its dungeons bursting with political prisoners. Meanwhile, there was peace all over continental Europe. Only England remained an enemy. It was England, now, that must be invaded and destroyed. The Directory agreed, appointing Bonaparte Commander-in-Chief of the Army of England, but after the best part of a year’s consideration he reluctantly decided against the project. The expense would be too great, the necessary manpower unavailable; above all, the French navy was in a deplorable state, no match for the British and with no commander who could hold a candle to Hood, Rodney or St Vincent–still less to Nelson.

The alternative was Egypt. As early as July 1797 the Foreign Minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord,
¹⁹⁴
had proposed an Egyptian expedition, and seven months later had produced a long memorandum on the subject. Inevitably this contained a section deploring the cruelty of the local beys and pressing the necessity of delivering the Egyptian people from the oppression that it had so long endured; more worthy of attention was the suggestion that with an army of 20–25,000, which would land at Alexandria and occupy Cairo, a further expedition could be launched against India–possibly through a hastily dug Suez Canal. On 2 March 1798 the Directory gave its formal approval. Not only would the proposal keep the army employed and their terrifying young general at a safe distance from Paris; it also offered an opportunity to take over the British role in India, while providing France with an important new colony in the eastern Mediterranean. Finally, if a little more problematically, it would achieve a major diversion of English sea power to the east, which might make the delayed invasion possible after all.

Napoleon, it need hardly be said, accepted the command with enthusiasm. Since his childhood he had been fascinated by the Orient, and he was determined that the expedition should have objectives other than the purely political and military. To this end he recruited no less than 167
savants
to accompany it, including scientists, mathematicians, astronomers, engineers, architects, painters and draughtsmen. Egypt had preserved her ancient mysteries for too long; she was a fruit more than ready for the plucking. The country had been effectively under the Mamelukes since 1250. In 1517 it had been conquered by the Turks and absorbed into the Ottoman Empire, part of which, technically, it still remained; by the middle of the seventeenth century, however, the Mameluke beys were once again in control. A French invasion would doubtless evoke an indignant protest from the Sultan in Constantinople, but his empire, though not yet known as ‘the sick man of Europe’, was a decadent and demoralised shadow of its former self and unlikely to represent much of a threat. Unfortunately there were other risks a good deal more serious. The 300 French transport ships were poorly armed, their crews practically untrained. True, they had a naval escort of twenty-seven ships of the line
¹⁹⁵
and frigates, but Nelson was already known to be cruising in the Mediterranean. Were he to intercept them, their chances of escape–and those of the 31,000 men aboard them–would be negligible.

The fleet sailed in four separate divisions, the largest from Toulon, the other three from Marseille, Genoa and Civitavecchia just north of Rome. Napoleon himself left Toulon in his flagship
L’Orient
on 19 May 1798. His first objective was Malta. The island had been in the possession of the Order of the Knights of St John since 1530. The Knights had conscientiously maintained their hospital and had heroically withstood the dreadful Turkish siege of 1565, but as fighters for Christendom they had grown soft. When Bonaparte reached the island on 9 June and sent messengers ashore to the Grand Master, a German named Ferdinand Hompesch, to demand the admission of all his ships into the harbour to take on water, he received a reply stating that, according to the regulations of the Order, states that were at war with other Christian countries might send in only four vessels at a time. A message was returned swiftly from
L’Orient
: ‘General Bonaparte is resolved to obtain by force that which ought to have been accorded to him by virtue of the principles of hospitality, the fundamental rule of your order.’

At dawn on 10 June the assault on the island began. The 550 Knights–nearly half of them were French, and many more too old to fight–resisted for only two days. On the morning of the 12th they requested a truce; that same night a delegation came on board the flagship. The Order would give up its sovereignty over Malta and Gozo, so long as the French government used its good offices to find Grand Master Hompesch some small principality to which he could retire, together with a pension of 300,000 francs to enable him to live in a style that befitted his rank. Napoleon accepted, and immediately set to work on a programme of reform. In less than a week he managed to convert the island into something tolerably like a French
département
. The people were ordered to wear the red, white and blue cockade; slavery–such as it was–was abolished; 600 Turks and 1,400 Moors were to be repatriated; the number of monasteries was reduced and the power of the clergy drastically restricted. All gold and silver was to be removed from the churches, and all the treasure from the palace of the Knights–which included the famous silver service regularly used by the Order to feed the sick in the hospital–melted down into 3,500 pounds of bullion for Napoleon’s war chest. Three thousand French soldiers under General Claude Vaubois were left behind to provide a garrison, and within a week of its arrival the fleet was ready to continue its journey. On the 19th, Napoleon himself set sail.

France, however, was not to keep the unhappy island for long. In 1800, enraged by the behaviour of Vaubois, who had even tried to impose French as the official language and who now proposed to auction the entire contents of the Carmelite church in Mdina, the Maltese–led by their clergy–rose in revolt, hurling the French commander of militia out of a window. Vaubois quickly ordered all his men to Valletta, where he locked the city gates. Thenceforth the French found themselves under siege. Meanwhile, the Maltese appealed to the British navy for help, and several ships arrived to blockade any French vessels that might attempt to relieve their garrison. These were followed shortly afterwards by 1,500 British troops. Vaubois held out heroically, until–thanks to the blockade–he had only three days’ rations left. He was then allowed an honourable surrender and safe repatriation for the garrison, taking with him–to the further fury of the Maltese, who were not consulted–much of the treasure that his men had looted during their stay.

With the departure of both the Knights and the French, the Maltese found themselves under the authority of a British Civil Commissioner until such time as their long-term future could be settled. In 1802 the Treaty of Amiens–which declared peace between Britain and France, although Napoleon intended to observe it only for as long as it suited him
¹⁹⁶
–provided for the return of the island to the Order of St John; the Maltese, however, who had no more love for the Knights than they had for the French, let it be known that their own strong preference was for the security afforded by the British Crown–which, by the Peace of Paris in 1814, they were finally to obtain.

On the night of 1 July 1798, nearly two weeks after its departure from Malta, the French fleet dropped anchor off Marabout, some seven miles west of Alexandria. The landing of so many men, and so much equipment, in the small boats which were all that was available was a long and complicated task. It began only in the late afternoon, when a storm was already brewing. The vice-admiral, François-Paul Brueys d’Aigaïlliers, had advised delaying the operation until the following morning, but Napoleon had refused to listen. He himself did not reach the shore until shortly before midnight. Fortunately for him, there was no resistance until the army reached Alexandria, and even there the crumbling walls and the tiny garrison could do little to delay the inevitable. The whole city proved to be in a state of advanced decay, its population reduced from the 300,000 that it had boasted in Roman times to a sad and apathetic 6,000. Apart from ‘Pompey’s Pillar’ (which had nothing to do with Pompey) and ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’ (which had no association with Cleopatra),
¹⁹⁷
there was nothing to evoke its days of glory.

To the French army, therefore, the capture of Alexandria came as an anticlimax. The July heat was demoralising enough, but men who had expected a rich and magnificent city–with commensurate opportunities for pillage–and who had found only a heap of pestiferous hovels felt not only disappointed but betrayed. Napoleon saw that they must be given no time to brood, but must march at once on Cairo. Advancing along the western side of the Nile delta, they captured Rosetta without a struggle and on 21 July met the main body of the Mameluke army at Embabeh, just below Gezira Island. Napoleon’s exhortation to his troops, ‘Think, my soldiers, from the tops of these pyramids forty centuries look down upon you!’ has gone down in history, but was hardly necessary: the Battle of the Pyramids was a walkover. Mameluke swords, however valiantly wielded, were no match for French musketry. The following day he entered Cairo–to his men a slight improvement on Alexandria, but scarcely a
vaut-le-voyage
.